Skepticism

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FtB is going hyperplastic!

hyperplasia |ˌhīpərˈplāZH(ē)ə|
noun
the enlargement of an organ or tissue caused by an increase in the reproduction rate of its cells, often as an initial stage in the development of cancer.

Get ready — we’re expanding. We’re launching a whole new army of bloggers at FtB this week, so it’s going to get hectic and confusing. Some are leaving, even more are being added, so expect to see strange new blogs popping up in the list on the left sidebar, and lots of “Hello, World!” articles appearing in the Recent Posts list. I’m doing the grunt work of installing the new blogs so I may not be saying much here for a while — once the dust is settled we’ll do proper introductions and try to acquaint you with all the new people.

There was no “rejection” — there was a group of people going mad evaluating the overwhelming number of applicants, a bit of ranking by various criteria, and an arbitrary cut off point. We encourage everyone who didn’t get in this time to reapply.

The most common problem with applicants was a lack of experience. Just blog somewhere, build up a track record, and try again.

Don’t be discouraged if you have little blogging experience; we’re interested in providing opportunities to new voices. If you are inexperienced, we may give you a temporary account on our guest platform to give you a chance to try it out.

:P

In fact I specifically advertised this aspect when I told people about this opportunity. Maybe I misread “inexperienced” to mean “no experience” but it was supposed to mean “only a little bit of experience” or something.

Yes…but then what happened is a legion of applicants descended on us, and we had to put together criteria to rank them, and we had this swarm of people who already had a track record. We are also bringing in a few of those inexperienced people at a time in a group blog (in case you were wondering what that “New Frontier” thing was about) to get experience, but we didn’t want to have a group blog of 10 people in which all the voices would get lost in the cacophony.

I’m serious when I say people should apply again in the next round. This time we had novelty driving an almost totally indigestible mass of applications. Next time I’m hoping it will be more manageable.